I “mixed” this up this morning:
I’m not sure I like the addition of the green; the value difference between the green and yellow makes a pretty visible value difference in the center of the “shawl”. But if I “time” the green so it coincides with the lightest part of the turquoise, perhaps that will help.
Regardless, I’ve learned a few things:
- Strong color contrasts (opposite ends of the color wheel) will add a lot of “vibration”. This looks ok to good if used as pattern, but is very distracting when used as background. An interesting “solution” to this problem might be to make the background on the reverse side dominant in one of the two colors, e.g. a 3/1 twill rather than a 2/2 twill (which is how it is currently set up). I’ll have to try that with a different draft.
- Because of this, the overall appearance looks best if the weft gradient colors are (on the color wheel) located to either side of the warp that it weaves with. In this case fuchsia/blue is weaving with turquoise, green/orange/yellow/red is weaving with yellow. These are analogous colors, so look pleasing without too much “vibration” or dulling-out of colors.
- Differences in value are also very visible and will produce a “stripe” effect even if the gradients are smooth. The results that are most pleasing to my eye (at least in Photoshop) are those where there is only one gradient across the length of the entire shawl. It might be possible to get a pretty result with lots of gradients across the entire shawl, but I think you’d have to make the pattern extremely simple, otherwise it would simply be too “busy”.
I’ve also decided that learning is easier if you’re only turning one set of knobs at a time. If I were trying to understand the color interactions while simultaneously messing around with structure, it would be much harder to reach conclusions. I’d never know for sure whether the color interactions were different because of the weave structure or because of the colors themselves. As it stands, I’ve learned a lot from studying color in just one weave structure, and moreover a weave structure that weaves identically (only with reverse colors) front and back.
Now that I’ve a better idea of what happens with colors, I think I may move on to considering what can be done structurally to differentiate front and back – using the same profile draft, but “filling in” the draft with different structures on front and back.
After that, if I still have time, I’ll play around with different profile drafts, to give wholly new patterns, though I don’t think that is strictly necessary. I think I can get enough interesting variations with a single profile draft to occupy me for three shawls, and I don’t think that doing more profile drafts will teach me much more than fiddling with a single draft. I already understand the process for layering structures using Photoshop, so that would just be a repeat of what I already know.
I’ve begun to calculate what I’ll need for this project, in preparation for dyeing yarn. Because I need such small amounts of any given color, a small skein goes a loooong way. (For weft yarn, I think I only need 3 grams of each color per weft, if there are 30 colors!) So I am thinking I will either dye 30 gram skeins in a quart jar, or 50 gram skeins in a half-gallon jar.
The trade-off here is time: I can fit four half-gallons or 7-8 quart jars into my big dyepot. This means that, to get 60 colors for a two-gradient shawl, I’d have to do fifteen batches of 50 grams, vs. only 8-9 batches if I use smaller skeins. That’s 3 weeks’ worth of dyeing vs. about a week and a half, assuming I can get one dyebath per day on most days.
The advantage of dyeing bigger skeins is that, as it is nearly impossible to match colors perfectly, it results in less waste – I can use a single batch of colors for a long time rather than having dye another batch and throw the leftover colors away. (Or, rather, reserve them for undetermined “other uses”.) The downside is that it takes a lot more time, and requires bigger upfront investment. (90 colors, which is what it would take to do three color gradients, times 50 grams apiece = 4500 g or about 10 lbs of silk yarn! Even purchasing cheaply from India, that’s $300-350 worth of yarn.)
So I’m still mulling that over.
All is (relatively) quiet on the wedding front. Pretty much everything is settled at this point, so it’s just a matter of greeting the out-of-town guests as they arrive.
Hi Tien – just a thought – what about dyeing blanks (a la Nancy Roberts) to get the weft gradients you need rather than individual color skeins? It might save you some time (although depending on the look you are going for, might not produce exactly the result you want).
I’ve thought about dyeing blanks, but it’s hard to get precise control of the colors that way. By doing it as individual colors, I can control the gradient exactly, so that (for example) it starts and stops at the edge of a block or a diamond, rather than being spaced according to how the blank was dyed. In theory it should be possible to get that precision by counting rows in the blank, but I’ve never gotten that much accuracy.
Another option is dyeing seven or eight colors and then gradually blending them together. The problem there is that, in the transition areas (and with doubleweave), I’d be juggling four shuttles, two for each color sequence – slow and probably too mistake-prone (especially if the colors are close in value) for me to want to try it.
Perhaps someday I’ll find a simpler way…
I was wondering–Do you have any problem with Sabraset dyes not fully penetrating the yarn? I’ve been using WashFast but I’m noticing that, as I weave with the yarn and plies untwist or shift, white fibers pop up to the surface. Not the look I was going for.
I work with pretty fine yarns (30/2 silk at 7000 yards per pound), so that hasn’t been a problem. I have had trouble in the past with Sabraset dyes not penetrating when dyeing a fingering-weight, superwash wool yarn. My understanding is that if you presoak the yarn in the chemicals (water, acid, leveling agent) for at least overnight, to wet them out thoroughly, and heat up the dyebath SLOWLY, you get much more even results. But I haven’t had to put this into practice, so try it and report back your results!
I’ve always used Sabraset on a 2-ply wool and have never had a problem. I mix the “ingredients” in the pot, add the wetted wool, turn on the heat, and cook until the water is clear or mostly clear. Then I turn off the heat and let them cool in the dye bath overnight. For blending, I label each skein with it’s dye formula, and later label the balls with an additional letter, indicating its place in the sequence. I am so visual that I actually have to write the sequence on paper: AA, AB, BB, BC, etc, or when using 3 strands, AAA, AAB, ABB, etc.